Contemporary Art at the New Frontier

Exhibition Statement: TO bee

BoxoFFICE is proud to present TO bee, a solo exhibition by Megan Evans. Based in Melbourne, Australia, Evans’ career spans a spectrum of art practices from major public commissions and interventions to exhibition work. Her artwork is conceptually based, utilising a range of media from painting and drawing to video and installation. Over the past two decades, Evans has addressed issues of cultural memory, ideas of selfhood and the balance within the delicate nature of bio-systems. Her current work explores landscape and colonisation in a contemporary context and investigates ideas of place.

In TO bee, Evans will present a body of work that endeavors to question our ability to think collectively in the face of impending climate change:

For twenty years I have been interested in what I call Indigenous Intelligence; the way many indigenous cultures across the world have structured their social organisation around the collective rather than the individual. This has led me to an interest in what it takes for humanity as a whole to act collectively, motivated by a wish for the good of all rather than a desire for self-fulfilment.

Through a rather cursory investigation into swarm intelligence, I discovered bees which have been seen throughout history as an example of a kind of utopian existence that has eluded us as a species.The Bee Project is a long term project that looks at these issues through a variety of art practices including exhibition, performance, and social sculpture. The current series of exhibitions, titled TO bee, look specifically at bees and relating to them as individual creatures, which is anathema to the bee who exists only in a colony.

TO bee incorporates photography, video, sculptural installation and large scale drawings inspired by research carried out in the New York State countryside as well as in metropolitan Melbourne and in New York City.